Family history isn’t only about names and dates. Places and institutions can also play an important role in our family stories.
Back in 2010, on my personal GeniAus blog, I wrote about an institution that has been very important in our family history — St Mary the Virgin Anglican Church at Waverley in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Recently, while looking for a topic for this GSQ blog post, I returned to that old post. As one does, I started clicking on the links to see whether they still worked. Some didn’t.
One link I particularly wanted to revisit was the website of St Mary’s Waverley. It had contained a wealth of information about the history of the church building, rectors and its parish. To my disappointment, the site had disappeared.
Where did the website go?
St Mary’s hasn’t disappeared. The beautiful sandstone church still stands high on the hill in Birrell Street, Waverley, and remains an active place of worship. It is now part of the Anglican Parish of Bondi and Waverley, whose current website has information about services at St Mary’s.
But what had happened to all that historical information on the former St Mary’s website?
My search for the former St Mary’s website reminded me to try the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine before giving up. The former website had been captured 20 times between 2003 and 2007. Pages that had vanished from the live web were still there, waiting to be rediscovered. What a relief!
Thanks to the Wayback Machine I was able once again to wander through pages about a place that has been woven into our family’s story. In another stroke of luck I was also able to access the Anglicans Together newsletter in the Internet Archive.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this important information could be resurrected and posted on the new Bondi Parish website?
It was refreshing that St Marys still has an active Facebook Page with a link for visitors to connect directly with the Church team via WhatsApp.
This provided me with a timely reminder. We family historians make extensive use of online material, but we shouldn’t assume that because something is on the web today it will still be there tomorrow. Organisations change, websites are redesigned, domains disappear and valuable historical material can vanish in the process.
A dead link, however, doesn’t necessarily mean a dead end.
Why did St Mary’s matter to me?
My interest in the old website wasn’t simply historical curiosity. St Mary’s is intrinsically linked to my family history.
When I look through my digital family photo collection, I find several hundred photographs tagged “St Mary’s”.
There are photographs of the inevitable family historian’s trio of hatches, matches and dispatches, but they represent only part of our family’s association with St Mary’s. There are also Sunday School activities, Christmas pageants, social gatherings and other events associated with parish life.
There have been happy family occasions. Our four children were married at St Marys and eight of our grandchildren christened there. There have also been sad occasions. Two of our parents, my mother Elsie and father-in-law James, had their funeral services conducted in the same church that had also witnessed happier family events.
A familiar presence during our years at St Mary’s was the Reverend Terence (Terry) Dicks. He served as Rector for 37 years before retiring in 2004, so for most of the years that our family worshipped at St Mary’s he was simply part of the fabric of parish life. He was there through the ordinary Sundays as well as many of the significant occasions celebrated by families within the congregation. Terry loved an occasion, the sung eucharists each Sunday with “Smells and Bells” accompanied by heavenly music were beautiful spiritual events.
Terence was a man of the people, he cooked for parish functions and pitched in to maintain church facilities. He was always coming up with new ideas to raise money for the maintenance of the Church. He hired out the church and some of his magnificent vestments for the wedding scenes in Muriel’s Wedding. Terence loved the surf, he often popped into our home for a chat after his morning swims at Bronte. Sadly, it was from a surfing accident that Terence became a paraplegic. This restricted his activities but Terence continued to minister from his wheelchair for a time after this event.
Looking back, I realise that people such as our clergy, Sunday School teachers including Gweneth Primrose, the Organist and Church Administrator David Pitt-Owen, and fellow parishioners are also part of our family history. They belonged to the communities in which our lives were lived.
For us, therefore, St Mary’s isn’t simply an attractive old church in Waverley. It is one of the places that connects the people and events in our family history.
A church with a history of its own
Our family’s association with St Mary’s represents only a small portion of its long history.
The present church dates from the 1860s. Its foundation stone was laid in June 1863 and the church was consecrated in May 1864. Designed by prominent colonial architect Edmund Blacket, it was constructed from Sydney sandstone in the Ecclesiastical Gothic Revival style.
Some of its stained-glass windows are among the earliest made in the colony, while two windows in the south wall of the nave have been described as the earliest stained-glass windows commissioned in New South Wales.
Music has also been an important part of the life of St Mary’s. Its historic pipe organ was built by August Gern and installed in 1888. The church and organ were placed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 1999.
An article about St Mary’s published by Anglicans Together in 2004 carried the cheerful description “High and happy!” In discussing parish life, members spoke about the importance of music, liturgy, sacrament and companionship.
That last word resonates with me. A church can be much more than a building in which baptisms, marriages and funerals are conducted. It can also be a community around which friendships and social lives develop.
Places belong in our family histories
As genealogists, we naturally concentrate on people. We collect certificates, construct timelines, search newspapers and electoral rolls, analyse DNA matches and add names to our family trees.
Perhaps we don’t always pay enough attention to place.
Where did our people worship? Where did they meet their friends? Which halls hosted their social activities? Where did their children attend Sunday School? Which buildings formed the backdrop to important family occasions?
Understanding those places can add another dimension to our knowledge of our ancestors and more recent family members.
I was therefore struck by one statement in the heritage assessment of St Mary’s. Among the reasons for recognising its significance is its special association with a community for “social, cultural or spiritual reasons.”
That formal heritage language describes our family’s relationship with St Mary’s rather well.
Another lesson from the Wayback Machine
My return to a fifteen-year-old blog post started as a little trip down memory lane. Instead, it became a useful reminder about another aspect of preservation.
The Internet has become an extraordinary resource for family historians, but it is not a permanent repository. The links we carefully added to blog posts, research notes and source citations years ago may no longer lead anywhere.
When that happens, all may not be lost.
My search for the former St Mary’s website reminded me to try the Internet Archive before giving up. Thanks to the Wayback Machine I was able once again to wander through pages about a place that has been woven into our family’s story.
Perhaps there’s another lesson here too.
We spend a great deal of time preserving the stories of people. We should remember to preserve the stories of the places that brought those people together.
Note
I wrote a draft of this article in MS Word and then uploaded it to ChatGPT. ChatGPT made several changes to the structure and provided helpful suggestions for improvement and ideas for further content. After taking these on board and making further changes to text, content and structure I am submitting the above text.
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